The game “Lair of Sword
and Sorcery” grew from a few key moments from the past years.
I had spent the last few
years playing Dungeons and Dragons after a long time away from the game.
The
group was a mix of newcomers, old timers like me, and those in between.
Us old-timers thought
it would be fun to play a very old adventure with the new rules, which we did
for a while but it just didn't have the feel we wanted. So I dusted off the old
books and ran a group of adventures using
first edition rules. Again it just didn't do it for us. So I decided I
was going to make up my own rule set.
So I started, and planned out a role playing game that
didn't excite me any more than the system I had abandoned.
So the problem wasn't
the rules, or the pre-made worlds, or the playing group or specific adventure
flavor or style I was looking for. But
what was it?
I
thought: I’d get
right down to the roots, combing through materials from the late 70’s and early
80’s looking for the thing that role playing once had for me and was now gone.
I was reading anything and
everything and just couldn't find it.
And suddenly there it was on Ebay:
I saw these little guys
online, and I remembered everything.
I remember the day I
first got them as a kid. I took those little guys home and pulled out
construction paper, tape and pens and made a massive dungeon, but not the way a
gamer would now but the way an 8 year old would.
It was massive and sprawled 2 feet by 2
feet. A maze of full 3D walls , with working secret passages and
traps scattered everywhere. And roaming through
it were these little demons, wizards and snake men. 5 minutes of thought
towards some rules, pulled from the Fighting Fantasy game books, and I was
hacking through these monsters, trying different paths and playing for hours.
All on that board.
I sort of knew what role playing games were. I had the basic
Dungeons and Dragons red box set and thought it was amazing.
A lot of rules
though for an 8 year old who didn’t have an older brother or cousin to follow
to a game. But there were a lot of awesome pictures and tables full of weapons.
What I played by myself
in those first days wasn't Dungeons and Dragons, but instead my idea of what
Dungeons and Dragons was. Based on the
Dungeons and Dragons scene from E.T., the dungeons and dragons cartoon, and so many
movies, like Hawk the Slayer, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, and He-man, to
an eight year old all these things were from the same world and it all fit
together.
I had D&D color forms and
toy figures. Whenever I saw something in the world with a dragon or a
barbarian I thought it was all D&D.
It was all one glorious
world where the only limit was imagination.
Well when I got those figures
again on Ebay I broke out my construction paper and scissors again. I had more
fun cutting and taping that thing together than I’d had in many a night of
gaming in the last couple of years.
There were no rules to consider, no game balance in mind, nothing other
than having fun and creating something raw from scratch. I had finally found
what I was looking for and it all fell into place.
That day the game Lair of Sword & Sorcery was born.
If you want to have that feeling again too, think about picking clicking the "buy online" link and get your copy of Lair right now.
~Ripley
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